Who's Afraid of the Dark?
by Gracie Charlotte
Summary: This story follows the nightmares of a young girl and what they reveal about the people in her life
1. Prologue - The Start

**Prologue – The Start**

My mind had been plagued by dark dreams of fatal battles and tragic demises since I was six years old. Last night had been no exception. When my eyes had closed I had seen, as I had many times before, that horrible place where people died for the non-existent cause of trying to save the world from the hideous criminals which had infested its surface.

When I was six years old I had dreamed for the very first time of that monstrous place. The dark, overgrown forest which had seemed to close in on me and the forbidding trees which had scratched me and tried to pull me back as I ran. I ran so far into the stretching woodland that I lost my way and to try and go back would have resulted in my getting lost. So I slowed and walked until I could no longer walk, until I came to a smooth stone, it stood tall and proud in the ground and as if it should not have been there. I walked with trepidation around the stone which had captured my attention and taken my mind away from the fruitless attempts of my escape. I gasped as I saw what was carved into the rounded surface of the stone. A picture, of a man, a man not unlike my father who was laying with his arms crossed over his chest. The man was dead.

As I reached to touch the rippling surface of the stone, which seemed to shine although no light could possibly penetrate into the dense undergrowth which surrounded me, something moved behind me. Yet when my fingers reached the surface of the rock, they simply slid straight through. There seemed to be no substance to the rock and my arm followed the fingers which had already entered into the handsome stone. It felt cold inside, not like the humidity which clung to my body outside. My arm was up to the elbow was inside the stone and I thought that my hand would just pass straight through.

My fingers touched something calloused, yet soft, something squishy and apparently boney. This mysterious substance puzzled my young mind and, being curious as most six-year-olds are, I decided that if my hand was able to pass through the stone, then my head would also and I would be able to see what it was I was touching.

I opened my eyes inside the icy monument and screamed. Flesh, I was touching dead flesh. The flesh of my own father, who could not have been dead for long. He had not decomposed. The special stone tomb seemed to be keeping my father's body alive. My screams must have echoed through the house for, not a moment later, my mother had burst into the room where I used to sleep and woke me.

I had sobbed for hours in to my mother's chest as she shushed me and stroked my hair. She did not ask why, she did not move. When morning came we did not move. It must have been hours before the weeping subsided and my head had started pounding but it was the rumble of my stomach that brought my mother out of her reverie. She had pulled me up and carried me, as she had not done for years, to the kitchen where we ate in silence and then sat as the room darkened. I do not remember much after that but I know I must have slept with dreaming for when I next awoke, I was in my own room. In 1933, I had had the first dream, that had been it, the first of many each in different places with different horrors but each ending in the dead face of a friend, neighbour or family member.

The dream had reoccurred almost every night for years but I learned to control the screaming and my mother thought they had gone away, we agreed never to tell my father.

In 1939 my father was drafted into the war effort and taken from us just as we were getting back to normal, I was 12 years of age then and my dreams had all but stopped. Until that night when my father left and the dream came back with a vengeance which I was not expecting. My mother had sought out the company of other adults with the absence of my father and so she employed a nanny to look after me and to be a friend to her. We grew close as only a child and her nanny could and she listened. She listened more carefully than my mother who did not wish to speak of my dream.

My father rarely came home and when he did it was a cause for celebration. My mother would cook a meal more splendid than we were used to and we would laugh and smile at the luck which my father had. Just before my sixteenth birthday my mother has told us that she was expecting another baby which had shocked us all and that my father would be drafted out of the army due to the excellent service he had paid over the four years and be home when the baby was born.

I had entered my parents' bedroom on the morning of my birthday to wake them and found that my father was cold and pale. He had died, just like that, peacefully, in his sleep. Mother had been distraught and moved around the house like a ghost. I had sorted everything and he was placed in the family tomb in the town cemetery, the dreams were worse from then, but not the same. They then varied who they were about and what happened but were no less disturbing.

My mother was brought out of her haze by the birth of a bouncing baby boy and seemed to gain some of her old spring back with the addition to the family. He was named Alaric Daniel Jones after my grandfather and father respectively. As a family we grew back together and seemed to regain some of the normality we had lost during our grieving period. We moved on and forgot.


	2. Chapter 1 - Explanations are in Order

**Chapter 1 – Explanations are in Order**

I had thought, at the age of 17, that my nightmares were a thing of the past. Alas, I was terribly wrong. On the eve of my eighteenth birthday I sat in the squashy chair that was in front of the drawing room fire and began to dose in the warmth of the inferno. Yet I was not asleep when the vision came on. I could see all around me, I could hear baby Ric mewing from the kitchen. I let the vision take me in.

It was the same vision as all the others, with one major difference; the usual calm of the dark forest seemed to be false, it was unreal. The peace had been shattered. The green of the forest was covered by the sticky red of the blood spattered across it. It was a horrifying sight. The blood made a trail through the trees, I followed unable to stop myself and not really wanting to. There was something terribly wrong with this vision.

The stone was missing.

I awoke from the vision and found Nanny looking at me with a mix of concern and bewilderment.

"Adne, are you alright?" She said, checking over her shoulder and seeing my mother enter the room behind her.

"What is all the noise in here?" Asked my mother "Adne, I just got your little brother off to sleep, now what is all the screaming for?"

"I was screaming?" My own voice sounded strange, too loud compared to the silence of the forest. "Did I sound frightened?"

"Yes dear, you were staring into the fire and then opened your mouth and screamed," Said Nanny moving to the phone "Maybe I should call Dr Bree?" She suggested already dialling the well known number.

"I will do that Wilma." Said my mother, taking the receiver from her "Take Adne to her room and settle her in bed, please."

Nanny did as she was told.

A small rap came on my door when I was tucked up, awaiting the arrival of the town doctor. My mother entered, carrying a tea tray on her hip.

"How are you feeling, darling?" She asked, bustling around pouring two cups of steaming tea. She looked worried, more worried than I had seen her in a long time.

She said it softly and I knew that she was worried for my sanity but at least she did care about me.

"I'm fine Ma_ma_," I was always taught to say it like that. Ma_ma_.

"Will you tell me what happened? Nanny said that your eyes went out of focus and then you screamed," so I recounted my story to my mother, she listened without saying a word, taking in everything I said.

"Are you absolutely sure that is exactly what you saw?" asked Ma_ma_ when I had done.

"Yes, Ma_ma_, what does it mean?" I whispered, aware of her watching. She nibbled her bottom lip, a give-away that she was hiding something from me.

_Knock. _A quiet knock sounded on the door to my bed chamber and Nanny popped her head around the side of it.

"Doctor Bree is here, she is waiting in the foyer," she said before excusing herself.

"Well I'll leave you to it then," said dear Ma_ma_, she squeezed my hand and then left shutting the door quietly behind her.

Doctor Bree entered a short while after. She examined me and then left telling my mother that I should stay bed rested and she would be around tomorrow morning with my medicine. When Doctor Bree left the room Nanny returned and sat down on the end of my four poster and closed the deep red curtains I had chosen to go up around them.

"Listen to me, Adne, this is important."

"Yes Nanny," I replied obediently

"That's my good girl, now listen you saw something and I don't know what but it wasn't normal, that much I could tell for myself,"

"What do you mean it wasn't normal?" I asked and obviously the serenity in my voice breaking a little, showing how scared I really was.

"Well it was very high pitched at first and I could only hear it when it got lower in octaves. Baby Alaric heard it straight away through."

"Nanny what would you say if I told you that no medicine could help me?"

"I would say: why would you say that?"

"Because I saw daddy, when I closed my eyes. Just for a second then all I saw was red and I knew..." my voiced had finally broken and the pain I felt was seeping out through it. My daddy, my hero. Gone.

"My darling I cannot change what you saw, but you can." And with that my Nanny left my room. I knew she was only in another room in the house but it felt like she had deserted me, my last ally had left me when I needed her the most. I felt the tears well up from inside of me and didn't bother to stop them from flowing freely.

Through my blurred vision I saw the picture of my dad, in his army uniform, holding me for the first time. Looking down at me like I was some breakable piece of delicate china. The first time I ever laid eyes on my daddy. The only person that I wanted with me.

I jumped a little as a knock sounded very gently on my door. Ma_ma_ opened it and peeked in slightly. She rushed to me when she saw my tear stained cheeks.

"Baby don't cry," she pleaded. She stroked my hair away from my face. The only problem was I didn't know how to stop it; I didn't want to stop it. We sat like that for at least an hour though for all I know it could have been more. Me with my head on her shoulder just crying. Emptying out all my emotions that I had held on to since my dad had gone off to war and never returned. She shushed me and stroked my cheek and hair, comforting me.

"Adne, honey, I think it's time I told you the truth," my Ma_ma_ broke the silence in the end.

"What truth?" I managed to ask. I looked up at Ma_ma_ and saw that she was looking at the picture on my bedside table. The one of Daddy laughing in his uniform when he had surprised both me and Ma_ma_ by showing up at our picnic on the beach. It was my favourite photograph.

"Your father,"

"Daddy," I corrected her.

"Yes, daddy, well he umm... when he never came home..." she reached over and took the picture looking at it like it was the most fascinating thing she had ever seen.

"Ma_ma..._what happened to daddy?" I re- asked knowing only too well what was coming next.

"Darling, Adne, he's gone," I had to strain to hear her last word for it had gotten so quiet, quieter that a whisper. More like silence. I stared stunned at my mother. Surely she wouldn't lie about him not to me.

"He told me once, when we were young, that there were other realms in the world that could only be accessed by certain people, that he was one of those people and there would come a day when he was drafted away from us to fight to protect the other realms. That was the day he left." She stopped midway through her confession to check that I still followed "Your father was very brave, he did what he could but..." She seemed to choke on her won words "But... he was lost during a battle... that last time he came home, when he died... it wasn't really him, just a shadow sent to say goodbye." She couldn't say anything else. Tear were flowing freely from her face now.

"No," I said as loudly as I could. No- one had ever been to tell us that daddy had died; the one thing I wouldn't give up on was the hope that he would come home and surprise us again, like the last time.

"You're lying!" I screamed at Ma_ma. _She had to be.

"Adne. Please," she was begging me to understand but I couldn't. I couldn't have lost my daddy. No I hadn't he was still alive. She was lying to me.

"You're a liar. I hate you!" I bellowed firing all my anger in Ma_ma_'s direction. I heard her let out a small sob and then she got up, her elegant blue dress rumpled at the bottom trailing behind her and put the picture back on my bedside. Without saying a word she kissed my cheek and left.

"Ma_ma_, wait, I'm sorry!" I yelled after her but all I could see was the last trail of her dress turning the corner of the corridor. Regret flooded my system. I had told my Ma_ma _that I hated her but I didn't. I loved her and Nanny and Baby Alaric.

I turned and picked up the picture of my dad. I looked at it and realized what must have been going through Ma_ma's _head when she saw it. He looked so different. Like the person Ma_ma _married in the first place. Whole. I hurled the picture at the far wall of my room. Right then I hated my dad for not being here to hold me whilst I cried. I felt more alone than ever before.

The sun finally came through the open hangings around my bed. I was still sat up awake from the previous nights crying. The tears had stopped flowing at around three o clock in the morning but then I hadn't been able to sleep even if I wanted to. I looked around my room and noticed the shards of glass on the floor. The picture lay a few inches away face down on the floor. I closed my eyes only to open them again to the sound of the bedroom door opening very slowly.

A small gurgling noise came from behind the door. And head popped a round the corner. Baby Alaric. He crawled to the foot of my bed and smiled up at me, showing his gums and the few of his teeth that were coming through.

"Hello Ric," I whispered. I don't know why, maybe I was afraid anyone else would hear. I picked him up and sat him on my knee. He was warm and smelled like baby powder and bubble bath. I sat for a while before pulling on my dressing gown over my nightdress and slipping my feet into my slippers. I couldn't hear Ma_ma_ looking for Ric but I picked him up anyway and sat him on my hip. He wriggled to try and get free but I held him tight.

"Let's go see if Ma_ma_ has some breakfast for you," I told him, I knew she would be worried about where Ric had gotten to if she cam upstairs and found him missing.

I descended the stairs and went unto the kitchen, it was empty. Which was odd considering the time and the fact that Ma_ma_ had her breakfast at exactly the same time every day.

I took Alaric to his high chair and sat him in it while I went to check all the other rooms in the house, I checked the Parlour and the gardens, all the bedrooms and bathrooms as well as the kitchens and the basement. Ma_ma_ and Nanny were nowhere to be found. I was alone with baby Ric. He began to bawl from his high chair.


End file.
